End users have more media and communications choices than ever before. A number of prominent technological trends are currently afoot (e.g., more computing devices, more online video services, more Internet video traffic), and these trends are changing the media delivery landscape. Separately, these trends are pushing the limits of capacity and, further, degrading the performance of video, where such a degradation creates frustration amongst end users, content providers, and service providers. In many instances, the video data sought for delivery is dropped, fragmented, delayed, or simply unavailable to certain end users. Compared to legacy analog broadcast systems, start-up time for video streams can also be substantially longer leading to an inferior user experience. Hence, there is a challenge in providing an appropriate response strategy for these problematic network scenarios.